Emergency-room visits for e-bike and e-scooter injuries are climbing fast, and the steepest rise is among children. A new analysis from Truveta Research found that the rate of these injury-related ED visits rose 7.5-fold among children and adolescents under 18 between 2023 and May 2026, a 671 percent increase, with head and neck injuries the most common diagnosis and traumatic brain injuries turning up in nearly 7 percent of pediatric visits.
How big the increase is
The researchers examined a subset of Truveta’s health-system data and identified 12,485 ED visits carrying a diagnosis code for an e-bike or e-scooter injury between January 2023 and May 2026. To account for seasonal riding patterns, they compared the same January-through-May window across years. Among riders under 18, the rate rose from 9.3 per 10,000 ED visits in early 2023 to 71.7 per 10,000 in early 2026.
That growth outpaced every adult age group. Adults aged 18 to 24 also saw a sharp rise, from 14.4 to 44.8 per 10,000, a 211 percent increase, but they started as the highest-rate group in 2023 and were overtaken by children by 2026. The momentum has not slowed: between early 2025 and early 2026 alone, the pediatric rate jumped 155 percent, from 28.1 to 71.7 per 10,000.
These figures are larger than the “nearly 500 percent” framing that has circulated in some coverage. The Truveta data put the multi-year pediatric increase higher, at roughly sevenfold, which if anything strengthens the underlying point that injuries among young riders are rising steeply.
What the injuries look like
The pattern of harm is what worries clinicians most. Across all e-bike and e-scooter visits, injuries to the head and neck were the single most common category, appearing in 35.4 percent of visits. Fractures showed up in about 27 percent, and superficial injuries and contusions in 37 percent. Traumatic brain injuries, including concussions, accounted for 5.8 percent of injury diagnoses overall.
Broken out by age, children fared worst on the most serious measure. TBIs were diagnosed in 6.9 percent of ED visits among riders under 18, the highest rate of any group, before declining among young and middle-aged adults and ticking back up slightly for those 65 and older. About two-thirds of all patients in the analysis were male.
The researchers connect the severity to the machines themselves. Compared with traditional bicycles, e-bikes and e-scooters travel faster and accelerate more quickly, which can make crashes harder. They also note that speed limits, minimum-age rules and helmet laws vary by state and by vehicle class, producing an inconsistent patchwork of safety requirements even as ridership grows. The National Association of City Transportation Officials counted roughly 150 million shared e-bike and e-scooter trips in the United States in 2025, with trip volume up 30 percent from 2023.
What to watch and what remains uncertain
The authors are explicit that these are preliminary findings that have not been peer reviewed, and they list real limitations. Diagnosis codes for e-scooter injuries were introduced in 2020 and for e-bikes in 2022, so part of the measured increase could reflect clinicians coding these injuries more consistently over time rather than a pure rise in incidents. The analysis also captures only injuries severe enough to reach an emergency department, missing cases treated at urgent care or at home, and it does not separate riders from pedestrians struck by the vehicles.
Even with those caveats, the practical takeaway is clear. The single intervention the researchers emphasize is helmet use, pointing to a long body of evidence that helmets reduce head and brain injuries and that helmet laws raise usage. For parents of young riders, that means insisting on a properly fitted helmet, understanding local age and speed rules, and recognizing that shared-fleet vehicles usually do not come with helmets provided.
What the data cannot yet answer is how much of the trend will persist as coding stabilizes, and whether policy will catch up to ridership. The researchers frame continued monitoring as essential, and they argue that the concentration of head injuries among children makes this one of the clearer opportunities in pediatric injury prevention, if helmet use and consistent rules can be pushed to keep pace with how quickly these vehicles have entered everyday life.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
